Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Russian Environmentalist Continues to Fight for Ecology and Human Rights from Behind Bars

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 25 – Yevgeny Vitishko,
who is currently serving a three-year sentence in the Russian camps for
exposing Moscow’s destruction of the environment around Sochi in the run-up to
the Olympics, has continued his fight by releasing a new on-line book about the
lives of prisoners and the fate of Russia’s much-despoiled environment.

Vitishko’s book, entitled “Jail
Soup: Sketches in the Style of Solzhenitsyn Made by an Ecologicla and Political
Prisoner in Tambov Colony No. 2” (in Russian and with numerous illustrations),
is available online at chaskor.ru/article/tyuremnaya_kasha_36996.

The book demonstrates, Bellona
journalist Liya Vandysheva says, that Vitishko is holding up well and that he
has not ceased to be concerned about environmental issues even though he has
attracted attention in recent months for speaking out on behalf of the rights
of prisoners (bellona.ru/articles_ru/articles_2014/book_vitishko).

Prior to his arrest and conviction
on trumped up charges, Vitishko had been the moving spirit of the Ecological
Watch on the North Caucasus and had succeeded in exposing the ways in which
Moscow officials had run roughshod over even Russian environmental legislation
in their pursuit of personal profit and well-being.

He began serving his three-year
sentence in February 2014 and has become a spokesman for prisoners in his and
other nearby camps. But Yevgenya
Chirikova, a rights activist, has insisted that Vitishko remains focused on
environmental issues, something his book provides additional confirmation of (hro.org/node/20129).

But
at the same time, the Russian authorities have continued to arrest Vitishko’s
colleagues and succeeded in having one republic supreme court order the
liquidation of his Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus (yuga.ru/news/351598/).

One can only hope that Vitishko’s
moving new book will simultaneously inspire his supporters to even greater
activism and shame the Russian government into releasing a man whose only “crime”
was to call for Russian officials to live up to the laws of their country and
protect the environment for future generations.